Sunday, 1 November 2009

Pervirella (1997)

Ugh, I feel dirty just for typing this. This film is 92 minutes of badly lit, shoe-string budget boredom served up by two budding directors (Alex Chandon & Josh Collins) that was mysteriously hailed as some sort of cult classic over ten years ago. I am still to this day baffled as to why. I am also still completely mystified as to the reason why I splashed out £10 for this tripe!? Oh yeah, I remember now. It was for boobs. But these are no ordinary boobs, as they belong to one ultra cool brunette babe by the name of Emily Booth (then going by the name Bouffante), who was making her film debut. I will get my drooling, obsessive lust for this woman out of the way now, as there is plenty of hardened shit to scrape through….

Emily Booth is the UK’s answer to Linnea Quigley. She is gorgeous, perfect in fact. She has an extremely sexy voice, she loves rock n’ roll, video games and zombie flicks – she is every anti-social misfits dream girl. She is the only reason – repeat – only reason I bought this fucking wart covered asshole of a film, full stop. She wears a pink wig, gets naked an awful lot and makes out with some amazon bitch. The pervert in me could not resist.

So, basically the plot is that Queen Victoria, apparently still alive (we have no indication of the time frame here) by aid of strange pipes that pump porridge and dogshit into her, has sealed off London under a monarchy of terror. She is looking for a child, whilst squeezing rubber babies out of her dried up old snatch and forcing all sexual deviants underground where they have formed a new society – the cult of perv (a batch of fat nazi, mutant sex fiends) .The baby in question is Pervirella (Emily Booth), who is to be a future saviour due to her overactive sexual libido (just read all that back so far, seriously, this shit writes itself). She is saved by her father, some goofy professor who is like a spoof of Indiana Jones or Alan Quartermain or some other jungle jim with a fanny-ass name….who cares.The idea is that to control her sexual deviance, she wears an amulet (a loosely fitting one at that) and must travel across the kingdom (a gong and a papier-mâché globe) to find a magic elixir. So yeah, basically, that’s it.

The problem is that all of this stuff looks horrific and is absolutely uncomfortable to watch. I know full well, there’s no budget, but everything is gross and all the characters (barring Pervirella) are ugly and unlikable to the extreme. The start of the film is so painfully boring. It’s just a series of characters delivering poor dialogue to the abomination that is Queen Victoria (with cameos from Jonathan Ross and Mark Lamarr). I swear I don’t know who the fuck dreamt that bitch up, but it’s just so foul. There's a dude called "The Shend" and it's his real fucking ass name!?There’s this dude too, by the name of Sexton Ming (played by Anthony Waghorne) who is utterly repulsive, yet a dude called “Sexton Ming” plays the Queen Victoria character!? It makes no sense, none of it does. What’s worse is that the humour is desperately bad and even as a trashy exploitation flick this would fall flat on its face.The only other film I could compare this too (and it’s equally as crud) is “Die You Zombie Bastards!”

I’ve never watched a film so painful to sit through, I wanted to end as soon as it began, but my love of Ms Booth was just too much to abandon it so early. I was punished for my perversion, much like the freaks and mutants who make up the cult of perv. The fist thing that will spring to mind is that it seems like a very, very bad Barbarella rip-off and you can also tell the directors drew inspiration from Terry Gilliam when it came to set design and dialogue. I am no fan of Terry Gilliam by the way. I don’t care for weird little ships made out of plastic, visible strings and bad drawings. Sometimes that does work, where a film has real humour or an amateurish charm – this is a barren wasteland in terms of anything that has any redeeming qualities. Then, it tortured me further with Pervirella jumping the bones of old fat beardy dudes, just like “Wizards” fucked me over at the end with Avatar scoring with that insanely hot fairy, Elinore.

I hate this film (it raped me and it raped my wallet – we can’t even look at each other anymore), I don’t watch it and I certainly don’t recommend it to anyone unless you are a sick, messed up die-hard Emily Booth fan.

1 comment:

Oh man. Bummer that the movie turned out so bad. I hadn't heard about it until just now, and that DVD cover got me interested (hot babe with neon pink hair, a title like "Pervirella," the words "sleazy," "cult," "kinky," and "kitsch" sprinkled throughout the reviewer quotes, etc.). I still think I'd like to check it out myself though, just too interested to pass it up, y'know?

PS> I was just thinkin'. Me and a bunch of the other b-movie site guys (including Andrew, Saucerman, DarkSider, InformationGeek, and Shadow) are gonna be doing a movie review roundtable in February with the theme being movies wherein monkeys/apes/gorillas/whatever are a main plot point (I'm doing Night Of The Bloody Apes, Saucerman is doing Bride Of The Gorilla, Andrew is doing A*P*E*, etc.). Any interest in joining us?

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